Not a Chance

Summary

Dian has been coming to the Dominican Republic with her doctor parents for years. Now that she's 14, she had wanted to stay home in Canada, but instead she is helping her parents set up their clinic and looking forward to hanging out with her Dominican friend Aracely. When fourteen-year-old Aracely makes a shocking announcement, she is engaged to be married, Dian struggles to accept that Aracely has the right to choose her own destiny, even if it is very different from what Dian would choose for her.

One

You’re here! I sit straight up in my metal bunk bed, yank at the mosquito netting and wrestle my way out.

Aracely stands in the doorway, laughing at me. "Of course I’m here. I live here, remember? You’re the one who takes off at the end of every summer, Dian."

I ignore that comment and zigzag between suitcases and boxes to hug her. She doesn’t have to know that I didn’t want to come this year. She’s the only person who might make this summer bearable, and I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

She kisses my cheeks, tucks her black hair behind one ear and surveys my baggy, tie-dyed shorts and red polka-dot blouse. It will never get better, will it?

I clench my teeth and shake my head. The clothes are one of the reasons I didn’t want to come. Every summer, my parents bring suitcases full of donated stuff to wear while we’re here and leave behind when we go. The outfits are almost always awful, and they’re never anything I’d choose. This spring, when I realized that my parents weren’t going to let me stay home with my grandmother while they came here, I lobbied for them to at least let me bring my own clothes to wear. (They’re secondhand too, because according to my parents, buying brand-new clothes exploits poor workers in other countries and impacts the environment. But at least in Canada I get to choose my own clothes.) Mom asked if I planned to leave most of my own clothes behind at the end of the summer, and when I said no, she and Dad looked at me like I was dumping toxic waste into the village stream. They gave me a long lecture on compassion being more important than vanity. I shot back that they should have some compassion for me for once. They hit the roof, and here I am, at the end of June, in polka dots and tie-dye. At least they promised not to take any pictures of me this summer. That’s their grand gesture at understanding what it’s like to be me.

Aracely shakes her head. If you were my size, I’d give you half my clothing. You know that, don’t you?

I smile because I know she’s trying to help. Last summer, out of pity, she dressed me up like the other girls our age in Cucubano, in a tight pink top and a short skirt. She said I looked hot, but I felt like a Barbie gone horribly wrong—too tall, too flat, too skinny. Aracely is only a year older than me, but she has curves in all the right places, and at fourteen she could pass for sixteen.

The only sad thing is that big scar on her cheek. A donkey bit her when she was four, and someone stitched it up for her, but not well. It’s not like people here get free plastic surgery after an accident like they do in Canada. The scar takes up most of her cheek—a jagged line, rough around the edges where the donkey’s teeth scraped over the skin before biting through.

The first time I saw her, I was terrified. Then again, at five I was terrified of most things, and it didn’t help that my parents had brought me to a tiny settlement in the Dominican Republic where the ground was orange and everyone lived in wooden huts and spoke a language I didn’t understand. I remember hiding behind my mother in the schoolyard, with all the local mothers and their kids watching us. The adults were smiling at each other, and the kids stared at me, wide-eyed. My mother had a firm hand on my shoulder to keep me from bolting, and her grip tightened when the little girl with the horrible scar marched over to me. The girl took a pink hibiscus flower from behind her ear and placed it behind mine, then took my hand and led me off to play. She taught me how to pick the sweetest oranges, where to find the best climbing trees and how to catch a butterfly. Along the way, she taught me Spanish.

The priest who invited my parents here hired Aracely’s mother to do our laundry, cook our meals and look after me. I spent most of that first summer at Aracely’s house, and that suited me just fine; I loved feeling like part of a big family. As we got older, Aracely and I would take off on adventures of our own. My parents would assume I was with Aracely’s mom, and Aracely’s mom would assume I was fine because I was with Aracely. It worked out great, because no one would have let us do half of what we did if we’d actually asked permission.

Sorry I couldn’t meet the truck when you got here, Aracely says now, smoothing her skirt. "Abuela needed to find periquito for my sister’s cramps. Abuela was convinced that some still grows over by Beto’s field, but it doesn’t, and by the time she believed me, we were too far away to get back before the aguacero, and we had to wait until the rain stopped."

No worries, I lie. I’m not going to tell her how I freaked out when I didn’t see her with everyone else. A lot can happen here between summers, and it’s not like she and I can text each other our news. Even if my anti-cell-phone parents would let me have one, Cucubano doesn’t have cell reception. Or reliable electricity. Every time we come back here, we have no idea who’s been born or died since the summer before, and this afternoon Aracely’s mom must have seen the panic on my face, because she cut through the crowd to tell me my friend was only away for the morning.

I should have guessed, of course. Aracely and her grandmother—her abuela—often take off on expeditions to find some plant or another. Her abuela is a healer, and Aracely is learning. Last summer, Dad saw some of Aracely’s drawings of medicinal plants and asked her family if she could come to Canada to study someday. He says that with her knowledge of traditional medicine, she could make a great academic career for herself and then come back here and really help the community. Her parents were thrilled. Aracely is terrified, but she’s willing to do it if it’ll help. Now that’s courage. She’s never even been as far as Ocoa, the closest city, a two-hour bus ride away, but in a few years she’ll be living in Canada, which is so different from here that it might as well be on another planet.

Do you want help putting stuff away? Aracely scans my family’s makeshift bedroom. Before we arrived, Aracely’s mom cleaned it within an inch of its life. The concrete floor shone, the bunk beds were made up as well as any hotel’s, the chalkboards were a spotless black, and not a speck of dust remained on the teacher’s desk shoved into the corner. (It’s like this every summer. Being invited here by the priest in Ocoa means people treat our arrival like a royal visit.) In just a few hours, my parents and I have managed to track in big clumps of the inevitable orange dirt, and we’ve strewn our things all over the place.

I should clean up. Mom and Dad are in the other classroom, unpacking boxes for their summer medical clinic, and I came back here to organize but decided to take a nap instead—not that I had much success. Whoever thinks roosters only crow at dawn has never met Rafael’s roosters, and why our neighbor has to keep his snorting pigs and braying donkey right outside our window is beyond me. If I were at home this summer, I could sleep whenever I wanted—not that I would, of course. I’d be working at the bike shop, or lying on the beach, or going to the movies with Emily. In other words, doing what any normal Canadian teenager has the right to do in the summertime. Unless you’ve got parents like mine, who expect you to spend every waking moment saving the world.